It was around this time two years ago that I had begun wondering about a collaborative learning game that might involve role-playing and task completion. I suggested that the game shouldn’t preach, correct, or in any way disrespect the player’s intelligence, but rather amplify it through teaching the art of content analysis as a form of “participatory entertainment”. I was learning content analysis at the time with Open Intelligence, but lacked the tools that would accelerate the process. I was longing for something that didn’t exist and was wishing for a form of education that could provide the kind of collective intelligence I saw attainable when collaborative groups began practicing content analysis and synthesis together.

You may not be who you think you are.

In opposition to terminal creeds, Vizenor seeks in his writing to promote the concept of “survivance.” He tells Isernhagen: “if we have dominance — in other words, a condition that’s recognizable as a world view — then surely we have survivance, we have a condition of not being a victim.”55 Like his understanding of postmodernism, survivance is for Vizenor a condition and not an object. It is a way of thinking and acting in the world that refuses domination and the position of the victim. In Fugitive Poses (1998) Vizenor writes: “[S]urvivance, in the sense of native survivance, is more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; the stories of survivance are an active presence… .”56 Survivance is not passive survival but active resistance as well; it is the refusal of the insistence upon tribal people as “Vanished,” or as tragic victims, or as ig/noble savages caught in an unchanging past, or as the vanguard of an idealized New Age future. Chris Lalonde points out that “with his fictions [Vizenor] does what Foucault argues is what makes one insane in the eyes of the community: he crosses the boundaries of the dominant bourgeois culture in order to reveal the lies upon which it is based.”57

Eric Bonabeau of Sloan Review writes that the human brain evolved to “avoid complexity (not embrace it) and to respond quickly to ensure survival (not explore numerous options).” Today’s world is said to require “short response times and more accurate responses and more exploration of potential opportunities.”

Information technologies are thought to provide “a more accurate and intimate understanding of our environment”. With the paradigm shift towards Web 2.0 and tapping into “the collective” comes a new era that Bonabeau labels “Decisions 2.0.”

Bonabeau points out a weakness called “pattern obsession“, when we see patterns where none exist which then influences how we frame our decisions. He calls it a “common trap” that leads us astray due to our basic human nature. Collective intelligence, he adds, “can help mitigate the effects of those biases” by providing a diversity of viewpoints and input, thus deterring “self-serving bias and belief perseverance.”

Bonabeau considers the challenge of designing the right mechanisms for collective decision making and if giving all users equal voice, is better or worse than giving certain individuals a greater say than the collective? If it’s the latter, he ponders, “how should those special individuals be selected?”